SELECT LARK FROM BIRDS_TABLE ORDER BY LARK ASCENDING

Before you write I can be more bothered to write this sentence than I can to go and get the correct character to end the word Bronte. Not that anyone does anyway.

I had to go out to the car just now and all around were the sounds of birds, crows cawing absently, larks over the wall making very spring-like sounds and just the contrapuntal web of various other sounds. I like thinking about the wildlife; they have nothing to worry about because they do not know their own mortality. Survival is just an instinct and there is nothing outside the text of their lives. Anyway – very relaxing when all about is SQL and frames etc.

Trying to work out if some remastering and some extra noodling is enough justification to buy the new release of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. This is one of my favourite albums, probably one of the first really weird things I bought on recommendation of the cool people I started working with all those years ago. The vocal samples seem to have burned into my head over time. The one phrase “America is waiting for a message of some sort” doesn’t come from my memory; someone speaks it in to my ear.

I finally got up into attic yesterday, ostensibly to retrieve various BBC videos for my wife, more of which later. I did find an ‘extra’ photo album which along with some pictures of me in a Gallini T-shirt looking about 12, has many of my fellow students and co-workers from my placement with Bristol and West. I was going to scan them in last night to see if anyone recognised themselves. There is a picture of Gareth who I have been trying to locate for some time. I am shamed that I don’t remember his surname but he did divinity at Ox. Or Cam. and started me on Godel, Escher, Bach. Maybe pictures will be up tomorrow but with A for Andromeda on tonight that may not be possible. Anyway, back to the videos. These were the Bronte/Austen things from the early 80s. We started Jane Eyre yesterday and I had to bite my hands to get through the early excuse for child abuse perpetrated by Mr. Brocklehusrt, the nasty pastor who had the young Jane in the fiery pits of hell. We have reached the bit where she first meets Mr. Rochester who personifies the brute in black, the boot in the face. He thinks she is a fairy of some sort because he suspects she charmed his horse out from under him. I cannot tell through the over-acting, whether this is gentle teasing or a genuine belief in the little people. The long scene where Mr Rochester talks to Jane after arriving back at the house where she is Governess to his love child by a feckless French opera singer seems to be no more than Charlotte Bronte carrying out psycho-analysis on herself through the two main characters. Unfortunately it has veered in car-crash territory which means I will have to finish it now despite the hamming by Timothy Dalton. Why did I ever think he was a good James Bond?